@cracksloth: What I have made is tabs for proper MDI windows, but I'm thinking of adding tabs for menu items instead, as most MDI apps have a Window menu listing the MDIs. This could also be used for a lot of other apps.

I have a problem with Barnacle causing my system to slow way down. I'm running Barncle .992 on Vista Business. Currently, I only have one toolbar with 24 buttons for xplorer2.exe. 3 of those buttons are just blank icons for spacing. I noticed that if I leave xplorer2 open for a while with the toolbar running, after a while my system will really slow down. For example, if I type anything in notepad, it will take several seconds for the text to appear, as if was coming across a 300baud modem. It seems to get worse the longer the app stays running. The first indication I get is when I run my mouse across the toolbar icons it will slow down as if I was dragging it through molasses.

I suspected it was Barnacle because the problem appeared shortly after installing it. Tonight, I closed most other processes and ran xplorer2 and Barncle by themselves. After about 30 minutes the problem appeared. Taskmanager does not show high cpu usage. When I shut down Barnacle, the system sluggishness dissapeared.

Is this a Vista problem? Does Barnacle play well with Vista? I use Autohotkey with several other scripts and no problems.

I finally found everything I needed to run Barnacle and I thinks it's great. The compiled exe does not run on my Windows XP SP2 (I get "(null) is not a valid Win32 Application"), but the .ahk file runs nicely.

I got it to create a barnacle bar for EditPlus3, but I found that the class of the EditPlus3 window changes every time I run the program. Is there a way around that?

There is a problem with the ini file color parameter. The color code is interpreted as RBG order instead of the normal RGB or windows BGR format. For example, the color I used to create the green background in the snapshot above was: color=0001ff (the "Show Info" reports the correct RGB color code 00FF01).

After playing around with changes to my EditPlus3 ini file for a while I've also got a requested enhancement: could there be an option on the barnacle menu to reload it's ini files (to pick up changes or a new file), and/or to reload a specific ini file? It is tiresome to exit and restart barnacle every time I make a change to an ini file.

I'd also like to suggest that if there is no image specified for a button you load a default image of a blank button (it may already do this, but I didn't get any button images when I downloaded it). That way at least you could tell there was a button there, rather than just a blank toolbar.

I am currently working on a version with docking and undocking, but its not quite done. When it is I'll upload the code here.

I have discovered a problem that exists with the code already here though. If you change the size of the buttons in the ini to larger (say 30) the toolbar covers up the menu above and some of the stuff below. I don't know the dll calls well but I have a feeling it is in there somewhere.

If you are running as a restricted user / vista then it probably doesn't have permissions to create files in the folder you installed in and Barnacle needs to do that to function correctly. If you are running barnacle from a folder within program files then these restrictions apply. Try moving Barnacle to a folder such as C:\utils\barnacle and try and run it. If this fails and you're in vista try right clicking the shortcut / exe file and run as administrator once.

Recompiling with newest UPX version doesn't help, only an uncompressed Exe leaves all these poor scanning engines a chance. As it's not possible to fix the false positive problem if you keep using UPX, at least the Exe malfunction should be fixed.

Recompiling with newest UPX version doesn't help, only an uncompressed Exe leaves all these poor scanning engines a chance. As it's not possible to fix the false positive problem if you keep using UPX, at least the Exe malfunction should be fixed.

instead of writing an algorithm to internally decompress UPX'ed files and examine them for viruses, all AV programmers have instead turned UPX'ed programs into some kind spawn of Satan. but Icfu, i bet you know how to handle an AHK script.

The problem with the exe's are my fault not skrommel.. I made a batch script to recompile all of his ahk exes so that i could recompile them with latest version of autohotkey occasionally to stop the damn false virus alerts that plague compiled ahk scripts due to lazy antivirus coders.

But it seems a few of the ahk scripts have external resources that skrommel builds into them and my batch script results in a broken exe. Skrommel is a very reclusive genius type and sometimes it's hard to get him to give me advice on how to proceed. I will try to get the exes fixed right away.

i'd like to add a tip i found in the AHK forums: to avoid errors caused by UPX compression, one can remove or rename UPX.exe from the AutoHotKey's "Compiler" folder. this way the compiler will ignore the UPX compression flag and compile normally. of course, this will add to the file-size but that is another story.

Hello! I just stumbled on this wonderful Barnacle. I've been searching and dreaming of a customizable toolbar to inject into Adobe Indesign. Barnacle is perfect because it makes use of Indesigns thousand keyboard commands. And it works in Indesign, but is glitchy. Sometimes it flickers, sometimes it stays on top of Indesign's dropdown menus and sometimes it causes the scrolling to slow, other times it causes the tabbed menus inside the floating panels to freeze for a few moments. Unless it begins to work more smoothly, I will have to abandon Barnacle. I am running XP pro on a Dell Precision duo core with Indesign CS2. I tried lowering the system priority on Barnacle but it didn't seem to help. Finally, while Barnacle is running, it slows down other programs too that aren't even Barnacled. Is there something I can do to help Barnacle work better? All my toolbars appear just fine, its only the system performance that seems to be off.-Brother Gabriel-Marie

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that nothing you've written works properly under Windows 98SE, even though you didn't bother to list any specific system requirements for any of your programs. Like the rest, this one doesn't work at all for me. When run it complains that it can't find a long list of PNG files, selecting settings from the tray icon just opens an explorer window for the directory that it's in, selecting Show Info does nothing, etc.

Rekrul, I know you've probably heard this a million times and probably have good reason to stick with windows 98 -- but as a coder i think trying to support win98 is becoming something that isn't worth the effort, it's just no longer in use for all but a handful of people.

Rekrul, I know you've probably heard this a million times and probably have good reason to stick with windows 98 -- but as a coder i think trying to support win98 is becoming something that isn't worth the effort, it's just no longer in use for all but a handful of people.

Fair enough, but is it too much to ask that software authors actually list the system requirements of their programs? At the very least, if it hasn't been tested on older versions, why not add a note saying "Written for Windows XP/Vista. Not tested or supported on older versions of Windows."? I thought it was pretty much universally understood that if a program didn't list any requirements for a particular version of Windows, it meant it was compatible with all versions.

It used to be that every program listed all the system requirements, now even some expensive commercial programs don't bother to tell you what versions of Windows they work under. Some commercial programs DO still support it, so how are you supposed to tell which ones do and which ones don't if there are no system requirements listed?

To be perfectly honest, I downloaded a bunch of these little programs and after the second one failed to do anything, I realized that probably none of them were going to work. If the author had included a message such as the above, I would have just deleted them and moved on. However it "irked" me that authors no longer list the requirements as if it was just universally decided that people who have older systems don't deserve the courtesy of being told ahead of time that the programs might not work for them.

What if I'd installed a program that tried to change something harmless on XP, but which seriously affected the stability of 98? That HAS happened to me before. I may no longer be considered worthy of support, but don't I at least deserve to know that the software I'm considering installing wasn't intended for me?

I suppose you could argue that I should just assume that no new software is meant for 98, but quite a few programs do still support it.

You make a fairly valid point, but how far back are you expecting this software to work for? You saiod it was 'universially understood' that if a program did not list it's requirements then it would work on 'all' versions... All versions?? What, way back to version 1? If you are going to try and run a peice of software that was written in the last year or so, it clearly was not written to run on a pc running an 11 year old OS. One would assume it runs on the 'current' poppilus, with all the latest updates. That to me would be the assuption (but not nessarily correct). But to assume it will work on 'all versions of Windows' I think it wrong.

As a software developer it's neither cost effective or sometimes even technically possible to write software that works on XP, for example and also runs on 98. They are simply too different.

Apologies for my spelling on the previous message! I hadn't read thorough it..... I'm not normally that bad!

Try this:Hi Rekrul,

You make a fairly valid point, but how far back are you expecting this software to work for? You said it was 'universally understood' that if a program did not list its requirements then it would work on 'all' versions... All versions?? What, way back to version 1? If you are going to try and run a piece of software that was written in the last year or so, it clearly was not written to run on a pc running an 11 year old OS. One would assume it runs on the 'current' populous, with all the latest updates. That to me would be the assumption (but not necessarily correct). But to assume it will work on 'all versions of Windows' I think it wrong.

As a software developer it's neither cost effective nor sometimes even technically possible to write software that works on XP, for example and also runs on 98. They are simply too different.